SPITBULL

BLAND AND PADDED WITH CLICHÉS

Saturday, January 10, 2004

THE FICTIONAL MIDDLE CLASS

Joe Carter of the evangelical outpost (I finally noticed it's a lowercase site) wants candidates for president explain what income boundaries define the "middle class" 'cuz that's who the politicians claim to love and that's who'll get the breaks if they get elected. So, he wonders, who are these mysterious folks?

Ask the janitor sweeping your company’s floors and he’ll likely tell you he’s “middle class." Query the vice-president of marketing and he will give you the same answer. The single girls down in accounts payable and the married attorneys in the legal department will give the same response. In the land of equal opportunity, it appears, we’re all “middle class.”

Well OK, we at Spitbull must also be members of this favored class and so entitled to some of the promised political booty. But since we're not very good at sharing, we decided to let our formidable research skills loose on the Internet and see what we could discover about these other middle class imposters.

Joe! It's even worse than you could have imagined! Right away we found a dishwasher named "Dave Rudner" crowing:

When people hear I make $11,000 a year, they're usually pretty surprised. And I can't say I blame them. It's a handsome salary to command. But sometimes I think they have the wrong impression, imagining me living some sort of extravagant lifestyle. Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but $11,000 a year simply doesn't go as far as you probably think.

All right, so Mr. Rudner "writes" in the Onion. We don't care. We're entitled to our piece of the pie, unreduced by chunks devoted to literally fictional "middle class" pretenders! And don't think we won't notice if you slice it smaller! If we "donate" twenty bucks to our favorite candidate he owes us dammit. Just give us some time to figure out what we get for it ... it must be written down somewhere ...